PicPick: an easy to use screen capture utility
PicPick is a free screen capture utility which offers an integrated image editor and various tiny tools such as a color picker, pixel ruler, protractor, crosshair, whiteboard etc.
There are many free screen capturing programs out there; most of these offer the basic functionality and usually do not warrant mentioning in this blog. Not so with PicPick: at least FIVE different aspects of this program make it quite interesting and noteworthy, as follows:
- Versatile screen capture options
- Auto-scroll capture (for, say, websites or documents that scroll beyond the visible section of the screen).
- Built-in integrated image editor
- A slew of interesting, mini-tools: color picker, pixel ruler, protractor, crosshair, and whiteboard.
- A portable version is available.
Here’s a quick overview of each one of the points above.
- Versatile screen capture options: we’re all acquainted with full screen, active window, user-selected area captures, and even freehand captures, where you “draw” the capture area irregularly on the screen. PicPick also offers a “window control” capture, where you can automatically “hone in” on different areas within a window. Two less common capture modes are fixed region captures (where you specify height and width and move the frame around before capturing), and “repeat last capture” which will guarantee that your capture is precisely identical to the last one in terms of size and placement on screen – both of which can be extremely useful.
- Auto scroll capture: this one is useful when trying to capture a website in a browser or a document in any kind of window that extends beyond the visible part of the screen. Use the “capture window control” and point to the part of the window that contains the scrollbar.
- Integrated image editor: these days an integrated editor and/or annotation tool is almost compulsory, as most screen capture programs seem to have it. PROS: quickly perform operations such as resize or crop, nice set of effects that can be applied to selection (e.g. pixellate only a section of the image to hide personal info). CONS: once you add elements there is no way to change them unless you undo and start over. For example if you add a text label and decide that you want to enlarge it and add an outline color, you cannot change the properties of the one you already have but rather have to remove it and start over. (Need a better editor/annotation software? Try PhotoScape).
- Mini-tools: an interesting and useful selection. Color picker and palette tools (self explanatory), magnifier, pixel ruler (superimposes a semi-transparent ruler on your screen), protractor (for measuring angles), crosshair (for quick screen coordinates), and whiteboard (write/draw on-screen, for presentation or screenshot annotation purposes).
- Portable version: is available for downloading; unzip and run.
Other notes: supports user-defined keyboard shortcuts, dual monitors, including or excluding cursor in the captured image, and a number of image format outputs (JPG, BMP, GIF and PNG).
The verdict: this program manages to bring together a very nice set of screen capture functions and mini-tools, and provides a very nice user experience (all of this whilst consuming under 6 megs in memory). Very nice indeed.
Version Tested: 1.8.0.9
Compatibility: Windows All.
Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 1.21 megs).
Interesting one, more additional tools than average. I suspect it won’t move me from bliss of FSCapture bu will still try it. Who knows. Someone has to outperform FSCapture sooner or later.
Samer,
Sorry for being off-topic, but, since you mentioned PhotoScape in this review, I would like to point you out this:
http://www.mosaizer.com/
I guess you may get an interest in making a future review of the apps from it.
Regards.
This doesn’t have one feature of the free winsnap that I love and will no longer go without – the shadows. So much nicer to look at, and looks so much more professional. I wish winsnap had annotation tools, I’d be in heaven.
@Rarst: I’m an FSCapture guy myself, but I was in need of “fixed region” and “repeat last” type captures in the past. I just may make the switch.
@Mchal: thanks for bringing these up. Looking at these titles for possible reviews.
@Paul: indeed it doesn’t. Try writing the author and requesting, I’m sure its easy enough to implement.
I tried PicPick, comparing it to FSCapture. Although it has a lot of great functions, it seemed to be missing one important element of Auto Scroll capturing.
I opened up “Internet Options” through the Control Panel, and clicked on the “Advanced” tab. There’s a long scrolling list of options there. There is also a scroll bar on the bottom of the window, scrolling from side to side, because some entries are too wide for the small window.
FSCapture not only scrolls the window up and down, but side to side, so that all of the windows content are captured. PicPick only scrolled down the window, so some of the longer entries (longer, as in left to right) were cut off. maybe my experience was unique. It would be interesting to know if others have this problem. If so, hopefully the author of PicPick can add side to side scrolling.
[...] Screenshot PicPick. via: Freewaregenius. [...]
Another feature that needs to be added: timed screenshots.
I need this at times to take screenshots of games that suppress all sorts of hotkeys. This fairly simple feature is available with Faststone Capture and really needs to be included with PicPick.
I made a FS shot of this very page and whole sections were cut out like it was going for a specific height.
That was the only reason I found it interesting too vs. the Hoversnap that I’ve been using, but I’ll try some of these others too. Thanks.
mosaizer.com turns SiteAdvisor RED!!!
404 at DL page?
If it’s supposed to be a portable app also, does anyone know why it tries to set itself up when you execute the file to run each time windows starts up?
I don’t want to risk running this app on a public computer in which I shouldn’t be “installing” or running my own apps on to find that it does actually do something to the local PC, e.g. amend registry, load itself at start up each time, etc…
Any ideas please?
[...] user experience (all of this whilst consuming under 6 megs in memory). Very nice indeed.” —freewaregenius.com “PicPick Tools is simply brilliant. This single application has replaced 4 of my most used [...]
Been using FSCapture for a long while. But now I switched to Screenshot Captor, since i create dumps as part of bugtracking where arrows and annotation are heavily used.
Not as user friendly and polished as FSCapture but more powerful (better editing features, flexibility, filenaming syntax, autoupload to ftp etc.)
Check it out at:
http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/screenshotcaptor/index.html
You might also wanna check out Bugshot
M.
[...] ). Or you may want to use it alongside a more powerful/sophisticated screen capture program (e.g. PicPick or Screenshot Captor) and set a different hotkey for each so they don’t conflict. Try it out for [...]